From Dealing to Healing: Social Movements and Changing Conceptions of Marijuana in California

Over the past 25 years, social movement organizations and market entrepreneurs have helped transform marijuana from a black market intoxicant for “getting high” into a state-sanctioned medicine and wellness supplement for “getting well.” In this paper, I link the social movements literature on framing processes with theories of market emergence and institutionalization to explain this transformation. Drawing upon interviews, direct observation and the content analysis of 713 social movement organization press releases, I develop a typology for the different conceptions of marijuana’s use and statistically model how changes in the medical context, level of threat and intra-movement dynamics affect the likelihood that social movement organizations use these conceptions in their press releases.